If there are two things I've learned from these discussions it's that:
1. Nuclear advocates always talk about capital costs of building nuclear plants but never operational costs because the LCOE of nuclear fission energy is terrible and incrasing [1]
2. Nuclear advocates like to talk about deaths because that's highly favorable to nuclear rather than, say, clean up costs. Nuclear disasters get hand-waved away even though we've had multiple of them despite there only being ~700 nuclear plants built. Chernobyl is hand-waved away because USSR. But what about Fukushima? Japan is a developed and regulated country. Tsunamis happen.
So far $82 billion has been spent on the Fukushima clean up with no end in sight [2]. The final cost will probably exceed $1 trillion and take decades, maybe a century or more. The site requires active cooling still, which is where all the continaminated wastewater comes from, and the technology to clean up the core does not exist with no viable plan in sight.
1. Nuclear advocates always talk about capital costs of building nuclear plants but never operational costs because the LCOE of nuclear fission energy is terrible and incrasing [1]
2. Nuclear advocates like to talk about deaths because that's highly favorable to nuclear rather than, say, clean up costs. Nuclear disasters get hand-waved away even though we've had multiple of them despite there only being ~700 nuclear plants built. Chernobyl is hand-waved away because USSR. But what about Fukushima? Japan is a developed and regulated country. Tsunamis happen.
So far $82 billion has been spent on the Fukushima clean up with no end in sight [2]. The final cost will probably exceed $1 trillion and take decades, maybe a century or more. The site requires active cooling still, which is where all the continaminated wastewater comes from, and the technology to clean up the core does not exist with no viable plan in sight.
And that's from one nuclear power incident.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
[2]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku...